We Argentines believe we are world champions and we are in soccer. But that does not imply that we are in everything, although we act as if we were. And so it goes. The last lesson? The Justice of the United States sentenced us to pay 16,000 million dollars for the terrible way in which we retook control of the YPF oil company.
You can be in favor or against having a state oil company or if that control should be complete or partial, or if it should be governed by the rules of Public or Private Law. We could also discuss how the Argentine State acted against YPF or the Eskenazi family. But what is unacceptable is that we have moved so hastily.
This lightness – embodied in the way in which the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her Economy Minister, Axel Kicillof, entered the oil company – is costing Argentina a real fortune that, in fact, it cannot pay. So much so, that he could not solve this sentence even by selling all the shares he has in the oil company!
The Creole clumsiness was established in the condemnation. “Kicillof shamelessly declared that it would be ‘stupid’ to comply with ‘YPF’s own law’ or ‘respect’ its statutes,” said Judge Loretta Preska, who also explained that this way of proceeding exceeded the then minister because the Argentine Congress also advanced for that path. “Subsequently,” the magistrate recalled, “the Republic promulgated legislation that supposedly allowed it to acquire control of YPF without being ‘stupid’ and complying with the statutes.”
That’s how it goes At a time when the Central Bank of the country has negative reserves and we travel around the world in search of a loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), from China, from the BRICS group or from the country, organization or whatever, only this conviction will cost us $16,000,000,000. And I write it like this, with all the zeros, so that we glimpse the enormity of what it means.
It’s hard to absorb so many zeros, isn’t it? We could also put it this way: if we distributed the new debt among all Argentines, each one would have to pay $349. To some it may seem little, but I remind you that 40% of the Argentine population is below the poverty line and that the average monthly salary of Argentines is less than that figure at the value of the “blue” dollar.
The Argentine State, of course, will appeal the sentence and perhaps we will do better in the higher instances of US Justice. But beyond that file, it would be good if we take advantage of this blow to look in the mirror and evaluate what we are doing wrong. Because this ruling is added to other costs, such as the sovereign securities for 5,000 million dollars that the State also had to issue to compensate Repsol after throwing it out of YPF. And we should also add the sentences we have accumulated for manipulating official statistics. Only in April, only in London, only one judge, sentenced us to pay 1.5 billion dollars for that trap, while we have other lawsuits pending before the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) for 3.840 million dollars more .
To these mountains of money are added the 9.340 million dollars that Argentina also had to pay to the “vulture” funds, the same ones to which Kicillof and other officials ventured that we would not have to pay a peso. In the same way that they treated as “stupid” and “morons” those who warned about the risks and costs of their hasty decisions. Kicillof even retorted with a phrase to remember: “Everyone stay calm, this has been studied in depth.”
Thus, we believe we are world champions in everything. We believe that we know it all or, as we say here, that “we know it long”. We believe that we embody the “Creole liveliness.” But it’s not like that. And our negligence, arrogance, lightness, ineffectiveness and so much more has a very high cost, fixable in billions of dollars that one day we, our children and our grandchildren will have to pay. In the end, who are the “alive” and who are the “stupid”?
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